Breakaway Books

Authored by Helen Fielding; Published 1996; Romance

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

Bridget Jones’s Diary is a cornerstone of the romantic comedy genre, a classic story referred back to time and time again. Although some of its content has not aged well, I was surprised to discover how much of it still rings true thirty years after its publication—even if the novel is not quite as iconic as the movie.

The titular Bridget Jones has goals for her year: lose weight, stop smoking, and get a nice boyfriend. As she stumbles through the year’s ups and downs, we follow along with her (at times) comedically ridiculous love life. Through her affair with her boss, her mother’s acquisition of a foreign lover, and the beginning of her TV career, Bridget tries to keep a cool head on her shoulders and cultivate inner poise. Perhaps, with the assistance of her close friends and family, she can at least manage to get a few good dates in.

This novel is not written for the audiobook format. The style in which it’s written–fragmented sentences, to-do lists, daily calorie counts–it’s all meant for reading in hard copy. Read out loud, it started to grate on me only a few chapters into the book, whereas in a physical copy, I merely would have skipped the opening lists for each chapter. As much as I’d love to say that the women of the twenty-first century have moved past the obsessive dieting exhibited by Bridget in this book in her meticulous recording of her food consumption, I’m not sure we have. We are just as much, if not more, image-obsessed, but we also know we shouldn’t be, which is one of the reasons that this book feels so dated and also somehow unlikable: Who minutely records every calorie consumed, guilt free? I’d love to say that the general strain between single and married women has changed as well, and yet that seems an all too realistic part of this book. Finally, I’d love to say that men no longer exhibit, as Bridget’s friends call it, “emotional fuckwittage,” but, well, you get the picture.

The one part of this novel that I found unambiguously and uncomplicatedly hilarious is Bridget’s mother. She is quite a surprise, smashing all the stereotypes of a middle aged woman past her prime. Of course, I would be infuriated if she were my mother, but as Bridget’s? Pure comedy. I truly loved the periodic check-ins on her escapades. On the other end of the spectrum, my biggest disappointment in this novel is the strangely miniscule amount of time that we spend with Bridget and her true love interest–Darcy–together. I kept expecting more meet-cute type interactions, some adorable falling in love scenes, but, I guess that might be for a future novel? I was confused, to say the least. 

Images from the movie version of Bridget Jones’s Diary have floated around in my imagination for the better part of three decades as a seminal part of the rom com canon. The book, while decent, probably will not stick with me quite as long.